Some people in the Church cite Joseph Smith in an attempt to locate Book of Mormon lands in what is today the United States of America. In his 1838 history, Joseph describes his initial visit with the Angel Moroni and recites what Moroni told him: "He said there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the source from whence they sprang." "This continent," some students claim, means North America.
Noah Webster's 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language says otherwise. In Joseph Smith's day, all of the Americas were considered a single continent, the "Western continent." This was a perpetuation of the idea expressed by Ephraim Chambers in his 1727 Cyclopaedia that there were two grand continents, "the Old and the New." Emanuel Bowen in his 1752 atlas repeated this idea that Europe, Asia, and Africa were a single continent "as America is another." So, to Joseph Smith in 1838, "this continent" likely meant the Americas, the Western hemisphere.
Beginning about 1850 some atlases published in the US began separating North America and South America into two different continents, joined by the Isthmus of Darien known today as Panama. The 1850 Webster's Dictionary, published after the great lexicographer's death, continued to reference the "Western continent" and the "Eastern continent." Almost all European atlases published in the 19th century identified the Americas as a single continent, although some of them began separating Europe, Asia, and Africa into three different continents. Some American atlases published as late as the 1920's continued to show a single American continent. By the 1950's, geographers worldwide decided that North America and South America were two different continents and that modern notion continues today. See the blog article entitled "North America."
A dubious line of reasoning continues that Joseph Smith's "this continent" in 1838 was refined to "this country" in his Wentworth Letter first published on March 1, 1842. This famous letter, that contains the original Articles of Faith, says "I was also informed concerning the aboriginal inhabitants of this country and shown who they were and from whence they came..."
1838 this continent = North America, 1842 this country = United States of America. Voila, the Book of Mormon happened in the good ol' US of A, or so some people claim.
Except that one of Joseph Smith's close associates published a book in 1839 and used the phrase "this country" to refer to Mexico and Guatemala in addition to the US. This is what Parley P. Pratt said in the 1839 second edition of his widely-circulated A Voice of Warning: "We might fill a volume with accounts of American Antiquities, all going to show that this country has been peopled with a people, who possessed a knowledge of the arts and sciences; who built cities, cultivated the earth, and who were in possession of a written language." Pratt's star "antiquity" was the ancient Maya site known today as Palenque which is located in Chiapas, Mexico. For Pratt, Palenque was in "this country." So as to leave no doubt, Pratt refers to "North and South America" three sentences later in his treatise. This makes it likely that Joseph's use of "this country" in 1842 was intended to convey the same meaning as his use of "this continent" in 1838 and Pratt's use of "this country" in 1839.
People who insist that 19th century phrases such as "this continent" and "this country" must be interpreted with modern meanings are guilty of the logical fallacy of presentism.
